Part 10

“When the Committee of Safety advised me this afternoon,” he began, “that it was deemed best for us to fortify Bunker Hill--”

Just then a sentry tapped Tom on the shoulder with a gun barrel. “What are ye lurking about for?” he growled in a rough voice.

Tom turned around sharply. The sentry was an oldish man, unshaven, with shaggy hair and beard.

“I got business here,” he said. “I come to get Colonel Stark’s lead, and by the great Jehovah, I mean to do the same.”

The sentry spat. “Maybe ye’re honest,” he said. “Ye look to be. But General Ward’s a-talking to some important men from the Congress o’ Massachusetts right now. Couldn’t let ye in there if ye was King George himself, with the Queen tagging along.”

“I’ll wait here till they’re through then,” insisted Tom. “I’ll wait right here.”

The sentry shrugged. “Guess there’s no harm in that,” he muttered, and ambled off.

Tom sat down on the grass with his back against a poplar tree and looked up at the stars. They were just as bright as they had been when he crossed Breed’s Hill a few nights ago. He wondered if tomorrow he’d be going back there, lugging Kitty’s old blunderbuss with him. Suddenly he realized that he was sleepy. The tension had eased out of him, even though there was still thunder in the air, the thunder of war about to break. A man could only keep himself keyed up for so long. But it wouldn’t do--now--to go--to sleep. He ought to get up and walk--get--up--and--walk--

He opened his eyes and shook himself. How did it get to be like that--early morning, the light as broad as day? The sky was red and golden over eastward where the sea must lie. The grass around him was wet with dew. Smoke was curling upward from the chimneys round about, and in somebody’s barnyard he could hear a rooster crow. Lord forgive him, he’d slept all night. They’d drum him out of camp or at least give him forty lashes, and he deserved it, too.

He stood up just as a horse and rider came spurring to the gate. The rider dismounted hastily and approached the front door. He was a trim, neat man with fair hair, but he looked feverish and ill. Almost immediately a pint-sized man came out to let him in. The two shook hands.

“Ah, Elbridge, Elbridge Gerry, my good friend,” murmured the newcomer. “It is folly to try to seize and hold Charlestown. Yet, I must go.”

“Ah no, Dr. Warren,” pleaded the smaller man. “You are too well known. You stayed in Boston too long, and the British know too well what a great pillar of strength you have been to our colonial cause. As surely as you go up Bunker Hill, you will be slain.”

“I know,” answered the doctor tensely. “I told the friends with whom I dined last night that I would go up the Hill today and never come off again. I slept wretchedly, and my head aches, but after an hour or two--”

“Sirs,” interrupted Tom politely, “I am sorry to bother you when you’re about such weighty business, but I been here since six o’clock last night, trying to get some lead for Colonel Stark.”

Elbridge Gerry gave a snort of impatience, but Dr. Warren turned and smiled at the boy.

“I am sorry you had the long delay, lad. I myself saw that the lead was dispatched to Stark late yesterday afternoon. He’ll know what to do with it, if anybody does. His men will have melted it into bullets by now, and may be shooting it at the British, for all I know.”

He turned again to Mr. Gerry. “Ah, sir, ‘_Dulce decorum_,’ as all men know or must learn. Let us go inside, and send someone to lead my horse away, for he is as spent as I.”

Tom walked thoughtfully back to where his comrades would still be asleep in the empty cart. ‘_Dulce decorum_’! He knew what the Latin meant, for President Langdon had translated it yesterday afternoon. “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” But was it, he wondered. The sun felt gloriously warm on his back, and made his blood tingle. The birds were singing in the elm trees round the Common. Kitty was a pretty girl, and there were other pretty girls. Sweet to die? That sounded like a thing old men would think of, tired old men who never had to go out and fight, who would die in bed at ninety-three or so. Still, if you had to do it, you had to do it, and he guessed he was as ready as he’d ever be.

Over towards Charlestown he heard the boom of a heavy gun.

_Chapter Thirteen_

THE WORLD TURNED UPSIDE DOWN

Gerry Malory was back in Devonshire at daybreak on that hot June morning, only it did not seem to him to be morning, or any special time of day. He stood in a low valley opening toward the sea, and there were little farms all around him with hedgerows in between them, and here and there a church spire reaching toward the sky. He was not alone, for a man stood beside him, a man he had never seen before, about his father’s age, dressed in quaint old-fashioned clothes, and carrying an ancient gun. The gun looked like the one that belonged to the Yankee that had taken him prisoner in the tavern by Ipswich Green. The man was shaking his head and scowling. He seemed to be angry about something. Gerry was ready to protest that he hadn’t done anything wrong, when suddenly he thought that maybe he had. Maybe he’d been poaching again.

Just then the man spoke. “It’s the coming country, lad,” he said. “Don’t make the mistake I did in my time.”

“What mistake?” Gerry murmured, but he thought he knew. His words were drowned out by the deep boom of thunder. Again and again the thunder sounded, and the echoes rolled over valley and hill and sea.

His body shook like an aspen in a storm wind; his eyelids snapped wide apart. He was in the warehouse behind the stables near Long Wharf in Boston, Massachusetts, and Sergeant Higgs had him by the shoulder. The thunder still boomed in his ears, but the Devon landscape had gone back into his memory, where it probably came from. He was lying on his own blanket on a heap of straw, with the regiment’s goat tethered nearby.

“Wake up, lad! Don’t you hear the guns?” Higgs was saying.

Gerry pulled himself erect. He found it hard to come out of the dream that had seemed so real to him.

“Yes, I hear them,” he said. “Whose guns are they?”

“Whose would they be?” scoffed the sergeant. “Do you think the Yankees have guns like that?”

“No--no.” He was wide awake now, wider awake than he wanted to be, he thought, for the cannonading sounded ominous and near. “What’s happening, Jack? Are we marching against them? Have we attacked--or they?”

“Can’t tell yet,” said Sergeant Higgs. “All we know is, we hear gunfire. Lieutenant Apthorp has gone to headquarters to find out. You better get some breakfast. It’s best we be ready for anything.”

In the cobbled square outside, the men of the Twenty-third had built their usual cookfire, just as they did every morning, and gathered round it, salt pork spitted on bayonets and stale bread handed round by the mess sergeant. Lieutenant Apthorp did not come back, and Lieutenant Julian went to see what was keeping him. The cannonading went on. It was coming from the ships in the river beyond the North End, most of the men agreed. Maybe the Yankees had got together some sort of raft and were moving by water against Boston. The Twenty-third seemed more amused than frightened at this suggestion.

And then, without any official announcement being made, the word was passed from mouth to mouth, and everybody knew.

The Yankees had taken the hills above Charlestown in the night, and built some sort of entrenchment there. They were being fired at from three sides by the British men-o’-war, but it began to seem as if this would not be enough to dislodge them, as if a force would have to go out and drive them from the hill.

In the town behind him Gerry could hear the rattle of artillery carriages, the thud of horses’ hoofs as the dragoons galloped here and there. General Gage had called for his officers to meet at the Province House, and some of the men went off to hover about that grim, narrow structure and get the word as soon as it was handed down.

Gerry did not go to the Province House. He went to the edge of the wharf and sat there, dangling his legs over the side. The sun was getting higher and hotter, and he looked up at the sun, and then down at the thick grayish water lapping silently round the piers below. He thought about his dream, and he thought about the girl called Kitty, who was not so distractingly fair as Sally Rose, and wondered if she had got safe away. He thought about Captain Blakeslee lying dead under the locust tree. True, he had never wanted to be a soldier, but once he became one, he’d expected to bear his part well. Once he’d have been eager to march out when he heard firing, but he was none so eager now. Maybe he was afraid. Maybe that was a bad omen. He’d heard around the campfire that men who were going into their last battle often felt that way. If only he could forget the dream....

The sounds of confusion in the town behind him seemed to increase and grow. Now that he thought of it, none of the usual daily noises could be heard: not the tapping of the carpenters’ hammers, nor the thumping of handlooms, nor the creak of wooden machinery. The little Negro boys were nowhere about with their cries of “Sweep oh! Sweep oh!” He suspected that the town of Boston would do no work this day. Everywhere men were shouting and bells were ringing: Christ’s Church with its royal peal, the North Church with its sour note, and half a dozen more. Just as usual, the breeze that blew over Long Wharf smelled of fish and whale oil and the nearby stables, of tar, and spice, and wood smoke, but now, or did he imagine it, it had an acrid brimstone tang.

At eleven the men came trooping back, and the word was out. Every man knew what was to be the order of his day.

At half past eleven the men of Gerry’s company paraded on the Common, splendid in scarlet and white and brass, equipped with full kit, blankets, and three days’ rations, and drawn up beside them were fifteen hundred more. The ships’ guns still roared away, and every now and then a terrible blast let go from the battery on Copp’s Hill.

“They say it’s only a handful of farmers,” muttered Jack Higgs. “I’d not think they could stand such punishment for long.”

Gerry looked at Boston Common, the rambling field that had become so familiar to him in the past year: the crooked cowpaths, and the little pond, and the thick clumps of juniper and steeplebush, so handy to come upon when you were walking in the moonlight with a girl; the gravel strip where the officers still raced their horses, in spite of all the town fathers could do. He looked at the gabled mansions and quaint, crooked houses round, as if he never expected to see them any more.

“The Yankees’ll take more punishment than you’d think for,” he said.

Once on the water, the barges from Long Wharf joined with the barges from the North Battery, twenty-eight of them moving in two long parallel lines, filled with scarlet-coated men. In the leading boats were two polished brass field pieces, and the noonday sun struck everywhere on colorful banners and gleaming arms. For the Tories in Boston, it must have been a splendid sight, but Gerry turned his eyes toward the Charlestown peninsula as the troops were rowed across the blue bay.

Smoke and flame and awful sound kept pouring forth from the great guns of the fleet--the _Somerset_, the _Falcon_, the _Lively_. Dimly through the barrage he could see the little village where he had gone drinking at the Bay and Beagle and courting in the graveyard under the spring moon. On the hill above it, grown up overnight like a mushroom, stood a small square earthworks, silent, except for one erratic cannon that spoke now and then. Black dots of men moved about the earthworks, but no columns issued forth drawn up in battle array, no reinforcements poured in from any side.

Gerry’s spirits rose and he cleared his throat. “Is that,” he asked the sergeant, “the great fortification we’re all ordered out to tear down?”

The sergeant laughed grimly. “Don’t look very fearsome, does it?” he agreed. “But after the way they run us back through Lexington, I don’t trust them devils.”

“And I thought it was Bunker Hill instead of Breed’s they’d be likely to fortify,” went on Gerry. “That’s how we would have chosen. But that’s Bunker Hill, standing up behind there, bare as a plate. The little dugout is on Breed’s Hill, below.”

“Breed’s or Bunker makes no difference now,” said Sergeant Higgs. “Keep your cartridges dry in the landing. We’re headed in towards shore.”

A few minutes later they were all drawn up in a low-lying field where Charlestown peninsula extended, pear-shaped, into the sea. Gerry found himself in the front line, far to the right, with the light infantry of the Twenty-third and the King’s Own. To the left stood the grenadiers, and behind him the Fifty-second and the Fifth. He was feeling cheerful and brave now, and as safe as London Tower. It reassured him even more when the order came to break ranks and dine on the rations in their knapsacks before going farther along.

Sprawled in the hot sun, chewing his beef and biscuit, he eyed the landscape round him: the green, sloping fields, some cocked hay, and some standing grass; the swamp and brick kilns to the left; Breed’s Hill above, where the black dots still crawled around the tiny redoubt. He talked with the other men.

All the young lads, he found, were in their glory that the attack was to be made straight on, that this detachment of the British Army would pound forward full force and set the Americans running, or beat them down into their native clay. But the old wise sergeants shook their heads and said it was a pity Gage hadn’t ordered them to land at the Neck. They could have bottled up the Yankees in Charlestown then, and starved them out, and not had to fire a shot.

No, somebody else said, for to do that would have meant sending a force between two wings of its enemy, and that was a tactic frowned upon long before Caesar marched through Gaul. In the end they all agreed that they were well enough satisfied with the way things had fallen out. They’d march up that hill in double-quick time, drive the cowardly Yankees out of their burrow, and be back drinking beer in Boston before the sun went down.

They were beginning to take out packs of dog-eared playing cards when the word passed among them that reinforcements were disembarking on the fields to the left; that Howe had sent for the reinforcements because the Americans were bringing in more troops, the earthworks had been extended far to the left, and he didn’t like the looks of things at all.

Gerry began to put his uneaten food away in his knapsack. There wasn’t as much room in it as there should have been, because at the last moment he had decided to stuff in the rough shirt and breeches he wore when he went about the Yankee countryside. He smiled now, as he saw them there. Didn’t think he’d have a need for them, but you never know. Just then the bugles sounded and the officers called them to attention. Like one man the assembled army was on its feet. Gerry could see the newly landed troops drawn up away to the left, facing the redoubt.

General Howe, dark, florid and heavily built, stood forth and spoke to his men.

“Gentlemen, I am very happy to have the honor of commanding so fine a body.... I do not doubt that you will behave like Englishmen and as becometh good soldiers. If the enemy will not come from their entrenchments, we must drive them out, otherwise the town of Boston will be set on fire by them.... I shall not desire one of you to go a step further than where I go at your head. Remember, gentlemen, we have no recourse, if we lose Boston, but to go on board our ships ... which will be very disagreeable to us all.”

General Howe stepped a little aside and stood smiling proudly round him, his hand on his sword. The troops stood tensely, bayonets in hand, waiting the order to move ahead. The cannonading from the ships was so steady that they did not hear it any more, but the guns of Boston now set up an iron clamor that seemed fit to shake the earth. Now the artillery rolled toward the redoubt.

Gerry looked up at the serene blue sky, at a cluster of apple trees a little way ahead. There were trees like that on his father’s farm in Devon, and he wondered if he’d ever again see them growing there. He looked at the hill where spouts of dust shot upward as heavy balls hit the turf of the redoubt. Suppose they did have to board their ships and sail away? Maybe he wouldn’t sail away, maybe he’d go and find blue-eyed Kitty. Maybe he would....

The artillery seemed to have slowed and faltered, bogged down in the miry earth at the swamp edge, crushing the blue flag lilies as it moved forward again. At last came the order the scarlet host had been waiting for.

Gerry gripped his bayonet and stepped out as he had been trained to do. A rippling field of buttercups and daisies lay ahead, and beyond it a rail fence, but he saw no likely danger there. He glanced toward the redoubt where General Pigot was to lead the attack. Howe would march on the rail fence that joined a stone wall running to the waterside. Then Howe’s regiments and the light infantry would shatter the Yankees’ left and sweep across it, swinging inland to overwhelm the earthworks from behind. It seemed like an unbeatable plan.

The light infantry, men from the Welsh Fusileers and the King’s Own forged steadily ahead--but not easily. The day was growing hotter. What with ammunition, food, blankets, and firelocks, they were weighted down a hundred pounds to a man. Gerry felt the sweat burst out on his face. He wished he had a drink. He wished he could run his finger under the stiff leather stock that gripped his throat. He wished he could rip off his beaver hat. Clouds of black smoke with white under-edges were billowing up to the west of Breed’s Hill. Looked like Charlestown Village was afire. Well, Admiral Graves had wanted to burn it long ago.

He waded through the thick grass, almost to his knees, then out on a muddy strip of beach littered with driftwood and small dead creatures of the sea. Here they halted briefly to re-form.

Grouped now in columns of fours, the Welsh Fusileers in the lead, the light infantry advanced along the narrow strip of shore. They drew close to the rough fieldstone wall. That it had been hastily thrown up, Gerry could see now. Undoubtably there would be Yankees behind it. He half lifted his bayonet. They drew nearer and nearer. They were ready to deploy and charge, when the blast came.

The low stone wall seemed to leap forth at them in a searing torrent of fire. Like corn before the scythe, the men on both sides of him went down. More from shock than anything else. Gerry fell on his knees, but he lifted his gun and fired once from there. Where the bullet went, he never knew. Crouched in the foul-smelling mud, he tried to load again. Wounded men lay all around him. His own company seemed to be cut to pieces, but the King’s Own tried to form a charge and went streaming through. Again the tide of flame leaped forward. The scarlet line, broken in many places, reeled back. Again the officers rallied what was left of them, and again the charge came on. The whole world seemed to be dissolved in blood and fire, the cries of the wounded, the shouts of the officers, and the steady roar of the guns upon the hill.

He tried to pull himself upright, but just then he felt a terrible blow against his head. His ears rang. Stars and circles swam before his eyes, orange, green, and rainbow-hued. He seemed to be no longer a living thing, only one huge dull pain sinking into darkness.

He did not know how long it was before the darkness streamed past him and away, and he saw the stone wall abristle with smoking gun barrels. He lifted his head from the mud and gazed in the other direction. To his horror he saw the scarlet backs of his comrades fleeing helter-skelter toward the barges by the shore. He lay all alone, in the midst of the dying and the dead. One man was calling for a drink of water, and another man gasped out a prayer. Shattered muskets, ripped knapsacks, and the discarded wigs of the officers littered the beach about him.

His head throbbed and seemed to be swelling larger every minute, big as the sun itself, the sun that still glared down from the pitiless blue sky. He couldn’t think clear, and he knew he’d have to think clear, if he ever got out of this alive.

Finally he lifted up his head and saw a steepening of the river bank just ahead of him that made a sort of bluff he could try to crawl under. Inch by inch, painfully, he dragged himself among the fallen men. Most of them lay quiet now and were not troubled by his passage through. They would never be troubled by anything any more. They had not beaten the Americans, but they would never board the ships and sail away.

Once under the safety of the bluff, he lay there and sipped a little of the brackish water which he scooped up in his hands. There was blood on his uniform, and blood was trickling down from somewhere over his left ear, but he did not put his hand up. He did not want to know how badly he was hurt--not right now.

And yet, his own wound wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was the sight of the British Army running away. Running to the barges, fleeing back to Boston, beaten almost to destruction by a mob of American farmers at a stone wall and an earthworks on a hill! What was that old tune the band played sometimes on parade? _The World Turned Upside Down!_

What would happen to him, he wondered, when the Yankees found him lying here? They didn’t have bayonets, most of them, so they couldn’t run him through, but there were other ways to kill a man.

But maybe they wouldn’t, all of them, kill a wounded man, any more than he would. He’d gone among them, traveled through their towns, and found there men no worse than he. And at that he remembered the knapsack and the clothing in it. He reached down; yes, it still hung at his side.

Painfully, haltingly, he pulled off the ruined uniform, the muddy scarlet and blood-stained white. Then he lay there naked in the mud a little while, under the bluff of sun-baked clay, till he had gathered strength enough to pull on the country clothes, the garb of most of the men behind the American line.

“Maybe--if they find me--they’ll think I’m one of theirs,” he muttered, “take me in with their own wounded and bind my head up--and never know.” He managed a weak smile. The last prank he’d ever play on the Yankees, he guessed, but it was worth a try.

Somehow he managed to crawl up the bank and out on the bloody grass. He lifted his eyes toward the redoubt. Could he believe what he saw? It had redcoats swarming all over it, their bayonets drawn, struggling on the parapet with the Americans, leaping down on those below.

“So the lads have come back,” he whispered faintly. “We aren’t beaten after all. I should have known it couldn’t be--not Howe and Pigot! Not the Fusileers and the King’s Own.”

He tried to get to his feet, but he couldn’t because his head was too big and heavy. His head was as big as the whole world. His head was drifting away on a tide of darkness that swept by.

_Chapter Fourteen_

THE YOUNG MAY DIE

Kitty did not know what time it was or how long she had been asleep. She only knew that she was wide awake now, somewhere in the empty black middle of the night, and she could hear Gran’s voice from the taproom below.

“You may be an officer, young man,” Gran was saying, “furthermore, you may have come all the way up here from Connecticut, but I’m not impressed with that. I’m not one of your soldiery, nor obliged to take your orders. This is my son-in-law’s house, and the taxes upon it paid. I mean to stay here till he orders me from it.”

Kitty leaped out of bed and ran to the head of the stairs where she could hear better.